Hey Darren; that’s really a fantastic article! I assume you’ve put a lot of effort into that but believe me that’s the best comparison of eCommerce platforms I’ve seen so far 🙂 One question popped up on my mind. Do you believe that an eCommerce platform lacks certain competencies if a merchant using that platform needs external apps to support his/her store? I work for an app developer company – so I may be subjective in that sense – but for me eCommerce apps add a lot of value on top of the standard offering of the platforms. For instance, we provide AI powered personalization for the eCommerce websites. An eCommerce platform’s development team do not need to bother creating these competencies in house – and they may not succeed – as this is not their expertise. I’d love to hear about your thoughts 🙂

WooCommerce is used by a number of high-traffic websites such as Small Press Expo.[11] For the 3rd week of September 2015, Trends indicated that WooCommerce ran on 30%[12] of e-commerce sites and millions of active installs.[13] Ecommerce is rapidly growing worldwide and WooCommerce has over 39 million downloads as a plugin and is currently active on more than three million websites and is the most popular eCommerce platform in 2018.[14] WooCommerce has approximately 4% of the top million HTML pages.[15] In 2018, statistics show that the percentage of online stores that utilize WooCommerce through Wordpress.org's plugin is more than 30% of all stores.[16] WooCommerce has complete control of the market share with an outstanding 42% of all online stores being powered by Woocommerce.[17]

A fully customizable frontend to showcase your style is just the start. Create online look books, true-to-life videos, and even interactive content through AR and VR technology. Then, bring it to life. Shopify’s universal POS powers pop-up shops, product drops, and live events. Sync products, inventory, and customer data automatically across all your channels and expressions.

1ShoppingCart is the world’s most popular automated solution for businesses who want seamless integration of all the tools needed to be successful online. Add a Shopping Cart and Lead Capture to your website in minutes. Then use the built in marketing tools like Automated Email Marketing Campaigns, Affiliate Program Management to follow up with your customers and make more sales.
SuiteCommerce enables B2B and B2C merchants to rapidly create unique, personalized, and compelling branded shopping experiences across multiple channels. Differentiate your brand and exceed customer expectations, whether it is through mobile, online, or in-person, and empower your sales associates to provide engaging customer acquisition and retention experiences by utilizing a single source of item, inventory, customer and order data to feed your customer-facing systems. SuiteCommerce's integrated cloud-based nature unifies business applications and provides a central repository for order management and customer details, item and inventory data, creates seamless, omni-channel, brand experiences, and streamlines your business for continuous growth.
Note. I don’t feel like I should make statements like, “I enjoy WooCommerce’s product management more than I do Shopify’s” here because it doesn’t actually bring much value into the discussion. I’m just a guy. A user. And my opinion is not any more important than the other person’s. Inevitably, the way WooCommerce does a given thing, for example, is going to be better for some of you than how Shopify does the same thing. And vice versa. So the key here is to check all those features out by yourself and compare which platform just feels better.

Bluehost makes it easy to get started with WooCommerce web hosting. Simply choose the hosting plan that is right for your website needs, and then create or add your existing domain. We will automatically install WooCommerce on top of your WordPress website while also providing a free WooCommerce SSL to keep your site and transactions secure. Setup takes only a few minutes and then you can begin selecting a theme for your online store. Shortly after you've selected a WooCommerce theme, you can begin adding your products and payment information.